Satan promises to give his votaries all they desire; knowledge, wealth, honours, pleasure, vengeance upon their enemies; and all that he can give is disappointment, poverty, misery, hate, the power to hurt and destroy. He is ever holding before their eyes elusive hopes, and so besotted are they that they trust him and confide in him until all is lost. Sometimes in the case of those who are young the pact is for a short while, but he always renews it. So at Lille in 1661 Antoinette Bourignon’s pupils confessed: “The Devil gives them a Mark, which Marks they renew as often as those Persons have any desire to quit him. The Devil reproves them the more severely, and obligeth them to new Promises, making them also new Marks for assurance or Pledge, that those Persons should continue faithful to him.”[53] The Devil’s Mark to which allusion is here made, or the Witches’ Mark, as it is sometimes called, was regarded as perhaps the most important point in the identification of a witch, it was the very sign and seal of Satan upon the actual flesh of his servant, and any person who bore such a mark was considered to have been convicted and proven beyond all manner of doubt of being in league with and devoted to the service of the fiend. This mark was said to be entirely insensible to pain, and when pricked, however deeply, it did not bleed. So Mr. John Bell, minister at Gladsmuir, in his tract _The Trial of Witchcraft; or Witchcraft Arraigned and Condemned_, published early in the eighteenth century, explains: “The witch mark is sometimes like a blew spot, or a little tate, or reid spots, like flea biting; sometimes also the flesh is sunk in, and hollow, and this is put in secret places, as among the hair of the head, or eye-brows, within the lips, under the arm-pits, and in the most secret parts of the body.” Robert Hink, minister at Aberfoill, in his _Secret Commonwealth_ (1691), writes: “A spot that I have seen, as a small mole, horny, and brown-coloured; throw which mark, when a large pin was thrust (both in buttock, nose, and rooff of the mouth), till it bowed and became crooked, the witches both men and women, nather felt a pain nor did bleed, nor knew the precise time when this was doing to them, (their eyes only being covered).” This mark was sometimes the complete figure of a toad or a bat; or, as Delrio says, the slot of a hare, the foot of a frog, a spider, a deformed whelp, a mouse.[54] The same great authority informs us on what part of the body it was usually impressed: “In men it may often be seen under the eyelids, under the lips, under the armpits, on the shoulders, on the fundament; in women, moreover, on the breast or on the pudenda.”[55]